Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 38.1March 2012: 103-123

Detection in a Complex Age:

Collective Control in CSI: New York

Samantha WaltonDepartment of English Literature

University of Edinburgh, UK

AbstractThis article examines the rejection of the heroic individual detective figure inthe popular forensic crime solving drama CSI: NY. It explores how thisarchetypal modern figure is replaced by an integrated network of technologiesand human investigators. By paying close attention to the postmodernconditions of the information economy and the global political context of thefirst decade of the twenty-first century—specifically, the U.S. legal responseto the threat of networked terrorism—the article asserts that the demise of theindividual detective is inspired by the recognition of the limited capacities ofindividuals to respond to complex threat. In particular, the alternative vision tothe individual detective developed by CSI: NY is shaped by changing relationsbetween state and individual in the wake of the 2001 USA PATRIOT Act.Asserting the essentially conservative nature of CSI: NY’s collective detective, the article considers how mass fears of chaos and complex crime are consoledthrough a team of “everyman”investigators, who draw their moral authorityfrom the collective social body, and who justify their access to andexploitation of comprehensive databases through their selfless commitment toprotecting the security of the collective. The postmodern and posthumaneconomic and theoretical basis of this shift is explicated, as is the series’ reliance upon the technologies and information paradigm of cybernetics, inorder to account for CSI: NY’s contribution to the long tradition of detection, and to assert how thoroughly this popular narrative of consolation isimplicated in the economic and scientific contexts and the political concernsof the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Keywordsdetection, complexity, individualism, postmodernity, technology

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The figure of the detective has been seen by many critics as a literary responseto crises in the social and economic organization of modernity. The “simplestexample”of the epistemological interest of modern fiction according to SimonMalpas (9), the detective figure reasserts the gifted individual’s capacity to penetrate and know the social matrix in spite of the crowded conditions and de-centered muddle of urban modernity: the “strangeness and crowding and thus ‘impenetrability’ of the city,” as Raymond Williams has said of the nineteenth-century detective (87). The context for the perpetuation of the literary detective canlikewise be seen in the decline of meaning-conferring social institutions and theproliferation of modes of representation such as photography, advertising, andburgeoning twentieth-century mass media. In his essay “On Raymond Chandler,”Fredric Jameson sees the hardboiled hero Philip Marlowe as answering theuncertainty caused by urban breakdown, in which architectural factors andeconomic forces had reduced society to self-contained and isolated monads: “Since there is no longer any privileged experience in which the whole of the socialstructure can be grasped, a figure must be invented who can be superimposed onsociety as a whole, whose routine and life pattern serve somehow to tie its separateand isolated parts together” (629). A heroic figure, a genius and a maverick, thehardboiled detective’sprivileged insight, shared isolation, and sense of a moralcrusade displays an individualistic streak—the “romantic individualism” that criticStephen Knight notes in Chandler’s writing (138)—meaning that detective and thecriminal as an agent of anti-social unorthodoxy are often, perversely, aligned.

In the forensic, crime-solving drama Crime Scene Investigation: New York(2004-present), the figure of the detective is relocated to fragmented, fractured,dynamic, hyper-real, and infinitely plural postmodern New York. Drawing from arich inheritance of detective prototypes—including the classic British forensicreasoner Sherlock Holmes and the hardboiled urban sleuths of North Americannoir—the series both pastiches and moves beyond these modern heroes in itscreation of a “detective”capable of responding to the complexity of its earlytwenty-first century location. This change has repercussions for the distinctive roleof the detective to console, control, thoroughly know and ethically adjudicate,which it will be this essay’s objective to analyze. Writing of emergent detectivefigures of the early nineteenth century, Knight has articulated how the detectivearose as a “culture-hero bringing comfort and a sense of security to millions ofindividuals” in a culture in which “audience and author could believe in the subjective individual as a basis of real experience and could see collectivity as athreat” (28). Using a fusion of technology, extraordinarily sensitive forensics, and

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anti-individualistic teamwork on a military model, CSI: NY’s contribution to thelong detective tradition lies in its assertion that its nexus of technology andteamwork, and not the privileged experience of an individual, can be used to“control”and “console”mass fears of crime. Whilst recognizing that technologyhas contributed to making the urban excessively complex with the proliferation ofhandheld devices, instantaneous communications, and techno-savvy criminals, CSI:NY insists upon technology’s unique capacity to isolate, simplify, and reorder in theconfusion of the postmodern city. In a dual process, the responsibility, authority, andromantic individualism of the solitary detective figure is dismantled, and the“detective function”—the capacity to reorder, control, and console—distributedamong a group of state employees and their syndicated, technological network.Moving away, then, from the individualistic strain of the modern detective figure,CSI: NY moves beyond Knight’s assertion by promoting collectivity as a good, and subjective individuality as a threat.

This essay will account for the replacement of the individual detective by atechnological-team network through attention to the political and economic contextof the series’ creation. Firstly, the move from a heroic individual to a throng ofcomputational devices operated by a state workforce must be seen in the context ofthe economic and cultural significance of the shift from modernity topostmodernization. Modern social organization, broadly speaking, is built upon anindustrial model in which production is a process of assembly—the creation ofcomplete objects out of individually manufactured component parts—with adivided labor model to match. The modern experience of fragmentation andreification, and the detective who responds to this experience, is consoling becauses/he responds to the conviction that despite its disassembled appearance, order doesultimately underlie society, and that the parts can be put back together. The moderndetective can therefore be seen as an assertion of individual dignity and heroism inan alienated labor market, a figure capable of reconnecting the disassembledcomponents of a mechanical, but disordered, reified modern experience—“partial fragmented rationality elevated to the status of an absolute guiding principle ofhuman behavior” according to Marxist critic Ernest Mandel (46). This figure clearlyno longer fits the CSI: NY model, and a reason for this can be found in thepostmodern conditions of the contemporary information economy. Since the 1970s,instantaneous electronic communications, businesses as service providers, andcomputerized information exchange have largely replaced the industrial machineryand labor model of modernity in the U.S. Rather than the mechanistic, reified, andmodular urban experience, the postmodern experience responds to the

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heterogeneous, unexpected, and eclectic proliferation of information across non-hierarchical, user-generated, complex networks. Simultaneously, implication intechnologies and distribution over networks has shaped theoretical responses to thepostmodern individual as“posthuman.”As N. Katherine Hayles has contended, in asociety that is “enmeshed within information networks”(27) such as the U.S., “the posthuman appears when computation rather than possessive individualism is takenas the ground of being, a move that allows the posthuman to be seamlesslyarticulated with intelligent machines” (34). In a comparable thread, Michael Hardtand Antonio Negri have asserted that postmodernization and “informization”havechanged the mode and meaning of “becoming human” (289) to the same extent asmodernity’s private property and alienated labor model shaped the self-interested,right-possessing bourgeois individual and its romantic counterpart. They state:“Today we increasingly think like computers, while communication technologies and their model of interaction are becoming more and more central to laboringactivities. . . . The anthropology of cyberspace is really a recognition of the newhuman condition” (291).On a basic level, CSI: NY largely accepts this shift in laborpatterns in the work of its investigators. Their relationship to their work is shapedby the instantaneous, computerized information processing order of postmodernity.Recognizing themselves as part of an integrated and complex network, they reasserttheir personal fallibility at the same time as they celebrate the ascendancy of thetechnologies they use. Consequently, their role is reduced from reasoning toprocessing, and from solitary and self-determined wandering to self-abnegatingmediation between the disorder of the crime scene and the ordering capacity of thecomputer. The detective figure becomes the detective function, and is taken over bythis integrated network of workers and technology because it is no longer possibleto place faith in any sole subject, or in individual reasoning, without verifiabletechnocratic support.

The second argument of this essay will account for CSI: NY’s preference for acorporate, technological detective through attention to the political context of theseries’ creation: that is, the U.S. response to the rise of global networked terrorismin the first decade of the twenty-first century. Network terrorism has, of course,itself been made possible by the information and communication technologies ofpostmodernization. A nebulous and dispersed “decentralised and polymorphous network” (Bousquet 206),U.S. perceptions of al-Qaeda are essential context forunderstanding, if not the specific criminal threat posed in CSI: NY, which tendstowards eclectic and disconnected private crimes, then its presentation of thepowers and technologies with which the investigators must be equipped to console

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mass fears of crime specifically as a sprawling and dispersed threat. Recognizingthe complexity of the global context, CSI: NY shapes its resources to answerviewers’ fears about the diffusiveness of crime and to enforce the state’s capacity torespond. In terms of the long detecting tradition, this is a common trait. As RonaldR. Thomas has contended, the cultural authority of the detective since the genre’s inception has been founded in her/his unique ability to exploit the risingtechnologies and sciences of the day, meaning each successful case demonstrates“the power invested in certain forensic devices embodied in the figure of the literary detective” (2). In CSI: NY, the older forensic, bureaucratic, and identity-fixingcapacities of modern detectives—including photographs, imprints, and otherbiological measurements—are supplemented with a powerful array ofcommunication interception and surveillance technologies, capable of matching thecomplexity of the networks which are perceived to hide, and to hold the solution to,crime.

The political context of CSI: NY’sforensic and technological supremacy isparticularly relevant in relation to this essay’s central question of the decline of the individual detective. The ideological implications of this can be assessed byattention tothe show’s appearance in the context of the post-9/11 reconfiguration ofconstitutional law in the USA PATRIOT Act (2001). The Act empowered thegovernment to peruse business, medical, library, telephone, and online records, totap wires and access private databases, and to detain and question suspects with lesslegal justification than was previously necessary. Understandably, the Patriot Actsignificantly altered the relationship between the individual and the state, leading toanxiety over the erosion of liberal bourgeois rights and of the privileged position ofthe individual in American democracy and law. As constitutional scholar Susan N.Herman states, the Act meant that “administration officials were empowered to spyon anyone, including Americans, with less basis for suspicion and less judicialreview”(5) with consequences not just for suspects of terrorism. Herman believesthat the hurried creation of these laws offered consolation, “making people feelsafer” (14), with any concern for the erosion of rights by the unilateral expansion ofthe U.S. government’s executive power assuaged by an insistence on the need toprotect the security of the collective, and the assertion that the state was atrustworthy institution to hold such power. With this came a discernible rhetoric ofdefiance: when former U.S. President George W. Bush announced in 2001,“Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” (Bush 2001), he delimited anexclusive hegemony under the guise of inclusivity, at the same time as hechallenged the ethics, intelligence, and legal freedom of the any who would criticize

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or seek to complicate his simplistic polarization. Likewise, the U.S. government’s“Just Trust Us”philosophy, which suggested that the relinquishing of rights wasacceptable “as long as the people who wield that power act in good faith”(Herman7), asked a very specific thing of the liberal individual—to suspend personaljudgment and liberties in an act of generous trust of government authorities andsubmission to the interests of the“collective.”

Without attempting to address the critiques of the real “liberty”of the liberalbourgeois individual—an issue Ernest Mandel interrogates in his DelightfulMurder—this essay will assess how anxiety over the complexity of postmodernnetworks and the expansion of executive power over those networks is consoled inCSI: NY through a structured intolerance to individualism. The interpretation of theindividual who seeks to differentiate him or herself from the collective status quo asstubborn, arrogant, selfish, and dangerous is conveyed routinely in CSI: NY as afundamental explanation of criminal motivation; in portrayals of solitaryinvestigators as untrustworthy; and in the eccentric and hedonistic New Yorkersencountered during the process of investigation. The dignity and veracity ofindividual judgment is downplayed, while technology and the mutual support andscrutiny of the team framework are celebrated in a simple, ideologically affirmativeprocess. Anonymous, holistic surveillance consoles mass fears over complex threatsat the same time as the shared responsibility of the five-strong detective teamattempts to assuage fears over the threats to liberty posed by the expanse ofsurveillance and data-recording. The detective function persists in that CSI: NYanswers crime fiction’s essential narrative drives to explain mystery, to consolereaders, and to control deviance. However, the individual detective figure isreplaced by a collective control mechanism distinct from the innumerable iterationsof the post-Second World War police procedural drama, with its emphasis upon thehard-working, ordinary investigator working in the context of the legal frameworkand manifold corruptions of state institutions, most recently perfected in HBO’s Baltimore-based crime series, The Wire (2002-08). Relinquishing the counter-ideological potential of such detective figures, who may be willing to break the lawto achieve a personal moral objective or a just solution that corrupt state institutionsare unwilling or unable to pursue, CSI: NY boasts a patriotic,“Just Trust Us”policywith its morally standardized team which, as this essay will later suggest, displays amilitary unit dynamic and which uses team powers in uncritical support of the stateand the collective status quo.

This essay’sfirst section will discuss how the suppression of the individual isachieved, paying particular attention to the mutual scrutiny of the team and the

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dependence upon techno-science, which enables the investigators to achieve a levelof detachment, suppress their individualistic urges, and abnegate themselves in thepursuit of collective team goals. The postmodern and political-legal context will bereaffirmed, leading in the second section to a discussion of how militaristic techno-science is offered as consolation for mass fears, and how this shapes CSI: NY’s development of the figure of the detective.

I.

In order to approach the dismantling of the individual, it is fitting to beginwith the corpse. Rather than a routinely melancholic find, considerable humor andcamp grotesquery is achieved through the absurdity of killings (spearing by aswordfish, for example) or the materials found in autopsy (including a complete,undigested baby octopus). Gruesome, invasive procedures are common, with crashzooms into the degraded matter of the corpse interspersed with shots ofinvestigators taking palpable pleasure in the task of dissection. There is anegalitarian aspect to this fun-loving reduction of innumerable lives to the materialsof laboratory machinery, such that, underlying the upbeat, offhand portrayal ofhuman remains, CSI: NY reflects an archaic association of memento mori, and theexhortation to worldly humility. Collective values are expressed in the fact that eachmurder merits equal expenditure of energy, police-time, and technological resources,irrespective of the perceived social importance of the victim or high-profile natureof the crime. The crime laboratory is not underfunded or backlogged, and the CSIteam leader pays little heed to economic concerns: when he tests a new high-techfacial reconstruction device, he merely quips: “Looks expensive. Did I sign a PO for this?” (2.20 “Run Silent, Run Deep”).The message is that each case will betreated dispassionately and as a unit, although there are of course manyinconsistencies. Christiana Gregoriou, in her recent study on the language andrhetoric of serial killer narratives, notes how a hierarchy of victim“deservedness”isestablished with notable consistency across a spectrum of criminal narratives. Inkeeping with her findings, CSI: NY cedes greater dignity to younger and more naïvefemale victims, while judgments upon the lifestyles of more“deserving”victims aremade explicit. Nonetheless, the program’s episodic structure and limitedoverarching cases tends to resist empathy and promote a professional and scientificdetachment founded on the fundamental comparability of each case. Although, ofcourse, the complete success rate of CSI: NY’s investigators makes suchcompromises tolerable, it is the shared responsibility of victims (or more practically,

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their families) not to expect their cases to receive unique attention.Attempts to resist individualism in CSI: NY are particularly striking in the

show’s indifference to civil liberties. The investigators’willingness to interrupt andintervene in the private lives of suspects and witnesses demonstrates that they havethe capacity to open the world up to instantaneous scrutiny, at the same time as theyassert their right to do so. Of course, the romantic individualist detective figure,sure of his/her insight and abilities, frequently ignores the law in pursuit of a case.However, the interventions of the investigators in CSI: NY serve less to highlighttheir personal transcendence of the law and more to enforce the law, the messagebeing that such powers should be within the remit of the state collective. Much ofthe moral ambiguity of the long detective tradition is thereby lost, or rather, stifled.The audience is encouraged to find consolation in the morally upstanding team andtheir collective efforts, and to distrust all suspects. The investigators trick, threatenor bribe these suspects in order to search their homes or property; warrants areseldom used, and investigators are able to access comprehensive databases and pullup detailed personal records at the touch of a button. The ethics of theseinterventions are not portrayed as problematic; indeed, they are often made with adefiant sense of moral justification.In “Stealing Home” the team leader Mac goads a witness into slapping him, gloating with his colleague that he has tricked her intoassault so he can take forensic samples from her, which he would otherwise have nolegal right to do. So too, in CSI: NY, it is suggested that the innocent have no needof civil rights. When a suspect provides a convincing alibi, the investigatorresponds, “You won’t mind giving me a DNA sample, then?” (2.23 “Heroes”), effectively blackmailing an unlikely suspect for the purpose of accumulating agreater store of DNA for the database. Again, this is not displayed as problematic.In a consistently Manichean stance, CSI: NY isolates the independent and resistantindividual as a particular threat to their mission. Those witnesses who do havelawyers obstinately defending their rights to avoid questioning are portrayed aseither financially privileged, egocentric or suspicious potential deviants. Indeed, themost dubious trait of one villain, a multiple rapist, is the fact that he has employed ahighly skilled lawyer, and that together they refuse to provide the investigators withforensic evidence without comprehensive legal justification. A conservative straincan be detected in its insistence upon physical and ideological collaboration withthe executive and legal system CSI: NY endorses—the U.S. state in the midst of the“War on Terror.”An impatience with egotistic individualism, and its associationwith criminal excess, underlies CSI: NY’s unproblematic enforcement of the security of the collective. This comes without any interrogation of whether that

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collective system works or whether their own—if not extra-legal, then at leastgenerous interpretations of their own rights to enforce the law—constitutes anexcess which acts to undercut it.

In an interesting instance of counter-ideological posturing, CSI: NYemphasizes a moral disinterest in the immediate and concomitant costs ofinvestigation. In order to make the accumulation of forensic evidence possible, thecrime scene catalyzes a point of suspension in the city-in-motion, which must besolved in order to allow the city to flow once again. When a crime has occurred, thescene is taped off, commerce and traffic stops. “Can you give me the dead guy’s address? I want to send his family flowers just to say, thanks for ruining a day’sbusiness,” complains one unsympathetic local, who is quickly reprimanded by theinvestigators (2.14 “Stuck on You”). In a city dominated by rampant neoliberalism,the crime scene is economic irrationality exemplified, demanding a cessation ofeconomic activity and costing more the longer it is kept sacrosanct. In an episode inwhich a body is found on a building site, construction work continues as evidence isphotographed, causing an investigator to remark with contempt: “Looks like his friends are all choked up about it. I guess the building must go up” (2.17 “Necrophilia Americana”). Ostensibly, the CSIs are enforcing competing values—arespect for human dignity, community, the innocence of bystanders, and the right ofordinary citizens to live peacefully. Of more thematic importance is their resistanceto the pervasive possessive individualism which governs the city’s work ethic andits drive to greater productivity and accumulation. This has less to do with anythingresembling socialist critique than an impatience with self-interest claiming priorityover collective security as enforced by the executive.

Individual economic trajectories are shown to be delimited by the higherpowers of law enforcement, and must work in that context irrespective of theindignation or sense of entitlement of the business-people who complain. Suchfigures receive little sympathy, and indeed their displays of self-interest and egotismare on a plane with the motivations of CSI: NY’skillers, who are often cultural, aswell as criminal, deviants. In its lust for depicting the quirks and perversions of up-to-the-minute and exclusive urban vogues—whether it be subway surfing, urbangolf or invitation-only cuddle parties—CSI: NY adopts a highly accessible tone ofcommon-sense skepticism. Investigators act as a mainstay against the hype ofcosmopolitan activity with the crime scene functioning as a platform from which tooffer a pragmatic critique of the potential excesses of often baffling subcultures. Forexample, in an episode set in Harlem, the gentrification of notoriously neglectedareas, previously unfrequented by more wealthy New Yorkers, provides the context

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for a killing. A trend-spotter from a Madison Avenue fashion label is found beatenand murdered. On his camera phone are hundreds of pictures of one eccentricallydressed, stylish local girl who, despite her poverty, marks her individuality bydesigning and modifying her own clothes. For the trend-spotter, this girl is the“nexthot thing”and he intends to copy the designs and make a fortune from“street-cool.”However, a local designer, himself a member of the Harlem community, has alsobeen using the girl for inspiration. He murders the trend-spotter not just to protecthis source, but in disgust at the encroachment of wealthy outsiders repackaging thestreet-look to sell to consumers from the Upper East Side: “This is my neighborhood, my street, my people. Him and his big corporation raking in millionsoff the ingenuity and style of those poor kids,”he explains heroically. The irony is,of course, that this is something the murderer himself has become rich throughdoing. “You in your $3,000 suit,” an investigator replies, “You sold out your neighborhood, and your people” (2.16 “Cool Hunter”).In this case, the suffering ofthe murder victim is supplanted by a romantic defense of the intellectual propertyrights of an ingenuous beauty, whose resourcefulness in adversity is made to speakto a uniquely American spirit of modest, demotic enterprise. The deludedmurderer’s self-interest and egotism have moved him outside of the communitywhich he claims to represent, and he has taken to exploiting his people for gain, ineffect opening up the collective to threats of wider exploitation. Such hubris,coupled with his sense of heroic individualism, is the essence of his criminality, amoral message which the investigators enforce in their everyman role and in theiridentification with the collective of“real people”who form a backdrop to the story.

The common-person persona of the investigators has undoubtedly contributedto CSI: NY’sconsiderable popularity; however, it is worth recognizing itslimitations in order to adequately define both the show’s ideological commitments and its resistance to individualism. The investigators’sympathy tends to reside witha consciously defined class of regular, hard-working, low paid, and unassumingpeople from whose moral order the investigators claim to draw their collectiveauthority. However, attempts to upset the status quo or to exceed one’s stationthrough an act of self-interested scheming, rather than a gradual process of humbleexertion, meet with disapproval. This is because of the show’s assertion thatindividualism is a form of moral perversion which underpins most crimes. So muchis suggested in the episode “Risk”in which a subway conductor is mocked andharassed by drunk, spoilt college kids. They pull the emergency cords and open thetrain’s doors, making his train late and endangering his relationship with hisemployers. When one boy spits in his face, he loses his temper and batters the other

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boy to death. The conductor attempts to justify his crime as follows: “You ever had anybody spit in your face, Detective? I’ve been hit by soda bottles, cans, called every name in the book. . . . I make $43,000 a year to keep the city moving. Peopledepend on these trains and me for their livelihood, but who’s got my back? Who cares about the working man?” The investigator replies, “I did. Until you broke the law” (2.13). The conductor’s movement from moral conviction to immoral excess iscleanly accomplished through an ideological commitment to maintaining thecollective status quo as enforced by the investigators. Some sympathy will beoffered to the worker, reminded daily and viscerally of their lowly position withinthe collective, but when they lash out violently the sympathy stops, along with anypossibility of social or economic critique or a more nuanced view of the causes ofcrime.

Having established CSI: NY’s intolerance of excess and egotism, and itsinsistence that witnesses and criminals conform to the self-effacing moral pool ofthe collective, this essay will now turn to the figure of the detective in order toassess how the heroic individualism of this figure is dismantled in a manner thatseparates CSI: NY from its contemporaries, with implications for the long traditionof detection. As was mentioned previously, CSI: NY presents a different figure ofdetective to similar successful North America crime dramas such as NYPD Blue(1993-2005), The Shield (2002-08), and The Wire (2002-08), which all manifest anambivalence to legal and executive structures by representing the difficultiesindividuals face in the context of underfunded, corrupt or mismanaged institutions.As is especially the case in The Wire, in these dramas detectives must frequentlybreak or bend the written law, tapping into restricted systems, finding devious waysto convict, planting evidence and assaulting or courting criminals when standarddetection cannot provide resolution. Detectives—although working within a policeteam or detail—in many cases have a personal, overriding moral code which tothem justifies transgressions of the written law and the interests of the penal system,as well as the trust of other members of their own team and the overridinginstitutional framework. While the shortcomings of such crusades are both readilyapparent—and thematically central to The Wire, which responds to the demise ofthe “heroic”McNulty with a mingled sense of exasperation and loss—CSI: NYtreats the rejection of such heroic individualism as a moral necessity. In its ideal,methods of government control are aligned with unquestionable moral superiority;the concord between investigators and the institution is asserted, and eachinvestigation is succinctly brought to a close, thereby emphasizing that the stateworks and is both technically and ethically competent in protecting the collective.

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The benefits of the collective investigation team over the heroic individualdetective are emphasized in a case that over-arches CSI: NY’s second season. Thisinvolves investigator Aiden Burn, who becomes increasingly frustrated when themultiple rapist and murderer D. J. Pratt repeatedly avoids justice due to a lack offorensic evidence at each of the crime scenes. Although Aiden’s efforts in the case are initially supported by the team leader, Mac Taylor, her obsession withprosecuting Pratt eventually turns into a moral crusade, which inspires her to tamperwith the evidence by planting DNA in order to incriminate Pratt (2.2). As well ascontravening the fundamentally pure structural position of the evidence, Aiden’s deviance demonstrates a dangerous belief in her individual insight which motivatesher to transgress the law and her corporate role. This inevitably leads to her losingher job, which (aside from imprisonment) is the ultimate suppression of herindividual excess that the institution is capable of bestowing. Already committed toher campaign for justice, she then takes on the role of solitary investigator, tracking,monitoring, and photographing Pratt using consumer technologies and her owndwindling financial resources. Finally, when Aiden believes that Pratt is on theverge of committing an offence, she intervenes, only to find herself his intendedmurder victim and to suffer a painful death in a burning car. Operating alone andwithout the protection of the team, Aiden certainly resembles a “lonely questing figure,” but is by no means either “a hero” or the embodiment of “an absolutevalue” (Knight28). Instead, she appears vulnerable, unprofessionally enmeshed anddangerously single-minded. When her apartment is searched, the materials she hasaccumulated on Pratt using her rudimentary resources seem pathetic andpathological, resembling the photographic and newspaper archives accumulated byserial killers in numerous cinematic representations, and occasionally in CSI: NYitself. Although the team of investigators is moved by Aiden’s commitment to the case, a subtle sense of repulsion from her as rogue figure is mingled with thesuspicion that an unarticulated mental unbalance might have motivated hercampaign.

Aiden’s death and its investigation take place, however, in an episode entitled “Heroes,”and it is through a posthumous forensic “conversation”that she isbrought back into the fold of the mutual, moral, and methodical reinforcement ofthe team. WhenAiden’s burnt and unrecognizable corpse becomes grist for the millof the CSI laboratory, investigators are startled to realize that before she died, Aidenmade sure that sufficient forensic evidence would be left for the investigators toprosecute Pratt. Her courage and her selflessness, coupled with her understanding ofthe scientific capacities of the team and their obligation to work within a demanding

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judicial framework, account for why and how she can now come to be recognizedas a hero. It is not through her amateurish, solitary investigation that she achievesher heroic status, but through the—in her case absolute—disintegration of her bodyand individuated self, and the reconnection with collective goals, limitations, andresponsibilities. To reconnect this narrative to the series’ political context,it isworth noting that the specific complaint of rights activists against the Patriot Actwas the danger that a lack of transparency and a massive expansion of the right ofexecutive authorities to hold suspects on minimal evidence would mean that theeffort spent on evidence acquisition and evidence testing would be significantlydiminished. On these grounds, it might be possible to form the basis of an argumentfor CSI: NY as a critical narrative, which asserts that the expansion of suchexecutive authority can only be justified by the actual conformation of executiveauthorities to pre-existing legal structures which protect the rights of suspects. Inthe Aiden–Pratt storyline, this would translate as the investigator’s demand that evidence actually exist, and stand up to rigorous legal testing and collective scrutiny,in a manner that was not being reflected in the real-world detention of terrorsuspects by a secretive elite. I would argue, however, that CSI: NY’s recognizable impatience with rights-oriented individuals, its patriotic commitment to the military(which will be discussed in greater detail below), and its unproblematic, affirmativestance on the suppression of crime all make such a critical stance unlikely. Aiden’s transgression may hint at a “crack”or contradiction in the story’s ideology which,as Knight asserts, is discernible in other socially conservative, affirmative genericiterations. In cases such as that of the Newgate Calendar, which affirmed divinemeans of testing and punishing criminals, Knight notes certain contradictions in thestories which almost accidently undermine their own commitment to the ideologyof divine control. Although the ideology is thereby put under strain, the narrativeworks to deny this—“[t]he plotting recognizes reality, but this does not impingeonthe ideology” (Knight 15). In CSI: NY, mutual scrutiny, the collection of hardevidence, and identification with the moral order of the collective all affirm theideology that is under strain and, rather than setting an example to less meticulousexecutive authorities, claim to reflect the real meticulousness of the authorities itportrays.

A corporate, not a private eye, is the model for the CSI: NY’s contemporary detective. Satisfying a political framework of mutual scrutiny and the ideologicalsubmission of the individual to the needs of the group, it attests to an inevitablypostmodern recognition of perceptual heterogeneity and the loss of faith in theprivileged experience of the individual. The second issue relates to the use of

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technologies, which will be discussed in this essay’s second section. In regards tothe first issue, the benefits of the collective, group model are emphasized both in theparallel investigation to Aiden’s in the episode “Heroes,” which shares the fact thatthe highest ranking investigator and team leader, Detective Mac Taylor, served inthe Marine Corps. Upon learning of the murder of a Marine, Mac expresses hiscommitment to solving the case, stating, “When you attack one of us, you attack us all” (2:23). Mac's solidarity is with the Marines, and he becomes emotionallyinvested in the case, even brushing aside the assault of a street hawker committedby Marines whilst on shore leave, despite the fact that in other episodesinvestigators frequently pursue minor charges encountered during aninvestigation—something of a blow to the team’s “Just Trust Us”policy. What isimparted is that heroism only has meaning within a self-abnegating unit: a teammodel which is treated as a microcosm of the social collective. As much as the teamstrives to idolize Mac (the only potential “detective”figure that CSI: NY presents),he has already alienated his agency to an elite military body in which the subjectbecomes a unit—a highly skilled unit, but a unit nonetheless. CSI: NY thus createscontinuity between military and civilian elements of state security forces, at thesame time as it departs from figures of solitary genius and heroism. Mac’sprivileged experience is that endorsed and propagated by the state; hisunderstanding, capacity to unify, and moral code are derived from a higher body.Likewise, his corporate role as a Marine is mimicked in his practice as aninvestigator. Acting as a friend and role model, he is technically as capable as any ofhis four protégés, and any particular specialist insight is subject to the sameprocesses of testing and verification as theirs. Equipped with varying personal skillsand different cultural and professional experience, these younger investigatorsfrequently surpass Mac, but they are by no means infallible. Excepting the exampleof Aiden, they do not solve a mystery through any particular sense of personalcommitment or elevated insight, but through the mundane process of trial and errorand through dependence on networked technologies.

II.

This essay will now turn more specifically to the role of networkedtechnology in CSI: NY. Although it rejects“the subject supposed to know”(57), asSlavoj Žižek describes the detectivefigure, CSI: NY maintains the detective’somniscient structural placement. As Žižek goes on to state, in an argumentestablished on a Freudian/Lacanian understanding of the process of transference,

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the detective is a figure who “solely by means of his presence” at the crime scene, with its “diversity of clues, of meaningless, scattered details with no obvious pattern,” provides structural resolution in that he “guarantees that all these details will retroactively acquire meaning” (58).CSI: NY’s reluctance to place a subject inthis role and function can be accounted for, as is suggested above, firstly by itsreadiness to recognize the processing capacities of the individual as impotent withinconditions of postmodern complexity and heterogeneity, and secondly by itssensitivity to the political demands of a militarized social collective, for whom theprimary significance of the individual is as a source of complex deviance andinstability, as borne out in legislative responses to the random threat of globalnetworked terrorism.

In regards to postmodernism, it is fair to say that the flippant, existentiallydisintegrative and occasionally despairing rejections of the detective-hero, or theexperimentations with meaning absence, manifold perspectives, free-floatingsubject positions, and kitsch eclecticism found in the postmodern forays intodetective fiction of the nouveau roman—Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy (1985)or the bizarre police procedurals of Fred Vargas, for instance—find only minimalcross-over with the CSI: NY narrative. CSI: NY frequently shares the ironicdetachment characteristic of much postmodern cultural production, but nonethelessguarantees that epistemological and ontological uncertainties will be resolveddespite the central ambiguity of individual insight and the undeniable chaos andcomplexity of the world it explores. CSI: NY is not “postmodern”in the wayssuggested above, but it certainly responds to the opacity and high densityheterogeneity of the city, offering consolation through control of the verytechnologies that contribute to complicating the urban. Material dissection, sample-taking, measurement, taxonomization, chemical analysis, and data cross-referencingare just some of the many tools the investigators use to overcome ambiguity,indeterminacy, and flux. The “subject supposed to know”is withdrawn, but thehyper-confidence of investigators in manipulating techno-science is put forth as asolution. In each episode, facts are collected by these investigators and then fed intothe show’s actual star—“the system,”the accumulated network of personal records,geophysical data, ballistic, genetic, and material information through which theinvestigators process and match the evidence of crime. The solution is found in theconnection of all these details together, something which only the network can do.

Two examples of exceptions to the network-dependent detection formula willbe most effective in articulating how far CSI: NY departs from the heroic individualdetective. The first occurs when an investigator chooses to reconstruct the face of a

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skull in the old-fashioned way, using markers and clay to form the basis of a sketch,instead of using the department’s high-tech facial recognition software (2.23“Heroes”). When his hand-made composition appears to show the face of hisformer colleague Aiden, he switches to the expensive equipment for assurance thathis potentially inaccurate finding is the truth. Working considerably faster than theinvestigator, the machine quickly rebuilds the face from the bone structure, thendigitalizes the facial coordinates into a sequence of information which it cross-references with the department’s enormous store of facial records, eventually matching the skull to a photograph of Aiden. While the machine turns potentialhuman error into shocking fact, it is inconceivable that the investigator would usethe hand-sketch method to confirm the machine’s findings. The fallibility of humanjudgment is not shared by technology, which can only process, compute, and orderdata. A second illustrative example occurs in the episode “Trapped,”in which aninvestigator gets locked in a sealed “panic room”with a dead body and mustprocess the evidence before it deteriorates, using “old fashioned methods”(2.11).Numerous citations to Sherlock Holmes enliven the episode, and suggest that theprivileged experience of the individual, or the genius of a gifted reasoned, may stillbe able to threaten the technocratic dominance of the networked detective. However,even the appearance of a suspect smoking a calabash pipe cannot disguise the factthat the crime is solved by networked technologies rather than deduction orpersonal expertise. The investigator makes a copy of fingerprints using Sellotape,then holds his find up to a CCTV camera within the room for the investigatorsoutside to take a digital photograph from the viewing screen. The technological,bureaucratic, and surveillance matrix can then reassert its dominance, leaving thenow irrelevant investigator sealed in and waiting for the locksmiths. In both of thesecases, technologies come to perform the function of the detective, with the humaninvestigators acting as mediators between the chaos of the crime scene and the orderof the system. The fallibility of hands-on forensics, the vulnerability of the lonecrusader, and the deductive vacuity of the isolated investigator all contribute to thedeposing of anachronistic heroic detectives and their supersession by a vast networkof data and computerized resources with no central operator.

In order to fully assess the role of technology in postmodernization and itsrepresentation in CSI: NY, it is necessary to conclude this essay by looking atcybernetics, or “information theory,”which provides the series’ specific techno-scientific paradigm. Cybernetics, put simply, is a science of communication andcontrol. It gained in prominence as the networked computer, with its capacity tostore and order data, to rationalize complex details into manageable units of

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“information”and to share data with other networked devices, came to be theprevailing scientific paradigm in the U.S. in the years following the Second WorldWar. This rise was synchronous with what Steven Best and Douglas Kellnerrecognize as a central facet of the postmodern perspective: the view of the world as“composed of complex, dynamic, interrelated, and holistic processes rather than ofsimple, static, discrete, and atomistic mechanisms”(103). Best and Kellner describepostmodernism itself as “a constellation marked by the coevolution and co-construction of science, technology, corporate capitalism, and the military” (57): theincreased research, spending, and reliance upon computer and information systems,satellites, and communications which has been central to the late twentieth-centuryreworking of capitalism. In its military application, the premise and ideal ofcybernetics theory was that warfare be subject to a state of full control, automation,and predictability. With enough data, and enough computer intelligence to analyze it,cyberneticists asserted that the underlying order of any seemingly chaotic situationcould be made tangible. Technologies were developed which aimed to turn theworld into a charted, predictable, and total surveillance territory, the most lastingand most currently used of which is the USA’s NavStar GPS system. GPS and itssynchronized technologies would, cybernetics enthusiasts hoped, enablecommanders to “find, fix or track and target—in near real-time—anything ofconsequence that moves upon or is located on the face of the Earth” (Air Force Chief of Staff Ronald Fogleman, qtd. in Bousquet 217).

The penetration of this paradigm and these technologies in civilian life aremost striking in the ubiquitous applications of GPS, of which CSI: NY makesconsiderable use. Architectural obstacles to totality which defined the complexity ofthe metropolis in modern crime writing are effortlessly overcome, both throughpanning, in-flight shots of the city which zoom in to a relevant office or apartmentwindow, and through the frequent use of the GPS collage, a patch-work of multiplesatellite photographs which together create an aerial map. Shots frequently involvecrash zooming into this map, expressing the capacity that such technologies affordto locate a suspect at any given time. GPS data from mobile phones, SatNavs, andsecurity devices installed in cars are combined with digital photography to create“moving maps”which can plot an individual’s course through the city. Indeed, thisconceit is perfected in the case of a murdered blind girl who is found in possessionof a Braille GPS tracker, a device which annunciates its exact position in space toits user to help them move around the city, even giving specific details such asaddress and floor within a building. The tracker also records previous coordinates,making it possible to generate a retrospective map charting her course “from

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apartment to death” (2.2 “Grand Murder at Central Station”). By following thesecoordinates, the detectives reconstruct her route and encounter the individual whokilled her. The GPS tracker enables the complete charting of space and the fixing ofan individual unit within it at any given instant, the exposure of the city to effortlessnavigation with limited human error, and a complete recording, all of whichconform to the cybernetics paradigm and demonstrate the superiority of networkedtechnologies in controlling crime above individual deduction and the collation ofeyewitness accounts.

The movement away from the solitary modern detective figure—able to fixidentity and locate an individual in an over-populated and confusing, butfundamentally knowable, modern city—to a network of individuals andtechnologies able to console in a complex and increasingly interlocked age, atteststo CSI: NY’s acceptance of the cybernetics paradigm.Recognizing that the world isseen to be “composed of interlocking systems amenable to formal mathematical analysis” (Edwards 138-39), real-world physical relations and material qualities areabstracted into units of“information”and then subjected to organization and control.In each episode of CSI: NY reams of data are fed into computers, and simulationmodels run to decide how a crime was committed and under what conditions thecrime was possible. A compliant and infinitely forthcoming forensic database meansthat identities are instantaneously located from fragmentary traces. If modernity, asdefined by the historian Arnold J. Toynbee, is as one with humanism, whichrecognizes human beings as “the basis of knowledge and action” (Malpas 33), thenCSI: NY’s ideological commitment to the superiority of networked technologiesmay denote that the“posthuman”turn to other basis for knowledge and action mayhave found its articulation in crime fiction (while, of course, its application inscience fiction has been widely discussed). An epistemological shift of the kind mayhelp to account for CSI: NY’s considerable reliance upon processing. Certainly, thelimited regard paid to the individual in CSI: NY attests to a significant overlap withcybernetics theories. According to the political theorist Antoine Bousquet,compared to the formidable processing power of computers, the judgments ofindividual generals came to be seen as suspect in the post-Second World War years.With commanders acting as overseers of automated technologies and instantaneous,continuous responsive mechanisms, “Combat experience and traditional common wisdom of the military were thus devalued” (148). The cybernetics context can helpaccount for the processing role adopted by investigators in CSI: NY, as well as thelargely pastoral role of Mac Taylor, whose expertise as a manager of and friend tohis elite team far outbalances his responsibilities as a coordinator of their

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investigations. Both attest to the general diminishing of reliance upon the individualas a source of privileged experience and broad perspective.

In an era of mass paranoia over the threat of networked terrorism, thetotalizing fantasies of the war gamers and their optimistic belief in the organizingcapacities of computer systems may appear both naïve and insufficient. Such, atleast, is the view of Bousquet, who marks a change in the U.S. military policysparked by the failure of cybernetics models in the U.S. invasion of Vietnam, newparadigms founded on sciences of chaos and the rise of the Internet. The premisethat chaos underlies complexity and that chaos can be used to combat chaos has ledBousquet to predict that chaoplexic “swarm”models located in the paradigm ofnon-linear sciences will alter military policy through the synthesis of hightechnologies with the capacity of decentralized, non-hierarchical networks to acttowards a strategic, but tactically disorganized, goal. CSI: NY, although far fromimagining a “chaoplexic”detective, offers a reassuring response to this perceivedcomplex threat in its portrayal of a technologically competent security force.Asserting the need to penetrate and survey proliferating global networks, it situatesitself ideologically alongside the U.S. policy which saw a reworking of privacylaws, which were themselves justified by such a threat. The liberal bourgeoisindividual, whose primacy is necessarily effected by legal alterations, is imagined inCSI: NY not as a heroic or romantic wanderer, but as a potential deviant open tounpredictable acts of egotism and excess. The modern detective who was formed asthe individual par excellence is fragmented into a more ideologically pertinent teamof self-abnegating “everyman”workers, whose interest lies in promoting theinterests of the collective status quo, as well as the notion of the status quo asaligned with the interests of the collective. Taken together, all of thesedevelopments have considerable impact upon the long detective tradition,suggesting that the immensely popular CSI: NY shares certain of the fundamentalconcerns of “high”postmodern forms at the same time as it builds a conservative,ideologically-reinforcing narrative out of the very chaos and uncertainty thatinspires it.

Works CitedBest, Stephen, and Douglas Kellner. The Postmodern Adventure: Science,

Technology, and Cultural Studies at the Third Millennium. London: Routledge,2001.

Bousquet, Antoine. The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the

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Battlefields of Modernity. London: Hurst, 2009.Bush, George W. “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American

People.”The White House Archives. The White House, 20 Sept. 2001. 6 Feb.2012. <http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html>.

CSI: New York. The Complete Second Season. Dir. David Von Ancken et al. CBS.2005-06. Paramount, 2006. DVD.

Edwards, Paul N.“The Closed World: Systems Discourse, Military Policy and Post-World War II US Historical Consciousness.”Cyborg Worlds: The MilitaryInformation Society. Ed. Les Levidow and Kevin Robins. London: FreeAssociation Books, 1989. 135-58.

Gregoriou, Christiana. Language, Ideology and Rhetoric in Serial Killer Narratives.Abingdon: Routledge, 2011.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000.Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,

Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.Herman, Susan N. Taking Liberties: The War on Terror and the Erosion of

American Democracy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011.Jameson, Fredric.“On Raymond Chandler.”Southern Review 3.6 (1970): 624-50.Knight, Stephen. Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1980.Malpas, Simon. The Postmodern. Oxford: Routledge, 2005.Mandel, Ernest. Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story.

Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.Thomas, Ronald R. Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science. Cambridge:

Cambridge UP, 2003.Williams, Raymond. “The Metropolis and the Emergence of Modernism.”

Modernism/Postmodernism. Ed. Peter Brookner. London: Longman, 1992. 83-94.

The Wire. The Complete Series, Seasons 1-5. Dir. Agnieszka Holland et al. HBO.2002-08. HBO, 2008. DVD.

Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Lacan through Popular Culture.Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1991.

About the AuthorSamantha Walton is currently engaged in doctoral research at University of Edinburgh onintersections between crime fictions and their legal and scientific contexts. She holds a BA(Hons) in English Literature and Language from King’s College, London, and an MSc in

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Social and Political Theory from Birkbeck, University of London. An article on revenge andthe crime novel has appeared in Forum, and she regularly reviews for the GothicImagination.

[Received 15 August 2011; accepted 31 January 2012]